Monday, May 02, 2011

Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- Sun, 01May2011

Must have been the month-changeover issue, but I'm not sure how I managed to book two Spectrum gigs in a row. After almost 5 hours of playing the night before, my fingertips were pretty shot by the end of this 4 hour shift. My voice held out surprisingly well, though.

It started out *really* slow. I may have to re-think the start time on Sunday afternoons. (On the other hand, who am I kidding? If they'll let me play, I'll play.) My brother and his wife were there right at the start, so they got to witness the first couple of hours of dead air -- me desperately trotting out all my Best Stuff, and getting stone silence in return. It was a bloodbath...

But, naturally, right after they left, some little kids came up to watch, so I started in with the dance tunes. This quickly snowballed into the biggest Kid Party I've ever had -- at least a dozen kids, really getting into it. The gravitational attraction of Kids Having Fun is pretty irresistible to other kids, and their parents. And they stayed and stayed, too -- I was running out of danceable songs by then end, and that's never happened before. (I can't take pictures while I'm playing, but here they are waiting for the next song.)

Unfortunately, after a dozen songs or so, it degenerated into the bossy kids hijacking the show by whiningly insisting on songs they'd never heard of (and wouldn't really like) from the list, just by the titles. This bothered me at first, but then I figured that there are no bad songs on the list, and their essentially random selection process wasn't really much different than me choosing. I suppose, alternately, I could have just agreed to play whichever song they asked for, and then actually played any song I wanted -- how would they know?

Anyway, after the kids all drifted away it was evening and (a) it was a lot cooler, and (b) I started getting the dating crowd, who tend to sit and listen. Like (almost) always, the last hour was really nice, but I was getting really sloppy from fatigue, hunger, and fingertip pain, so I actually quit at Quitting Time for once. Almost exactly half the tips as the night before, but $56 is nothing to sneeze at, and watching those kids dance was the most fun I've had in a long time.

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